The idea of the forest carries deep cultural significance. What do we know about how the urban forest works — as living machine, as novel ecosystem, as a site for ecosystem services, and as a spatially and culturally rich landscape?

We envisage an entirely different city, one in which massive trees are no longer a rarity but instead fundamentally define and shape our movement through the urban fabric. With this action on the civic imagination, the city becomes a forest, and the forest a city.

To make sense of the fragmented territory of an ever-expanding Airport, West 8 planted a bombardment of trees. With hundreds, sometimes thousands at the same time, it was a strategy that worked everywhere.

New Orleans' veteran trees have the ability to function socially, economically and hydologically. The potential of New Orleans' expansive canopies can be seen as a basis for a simple but powerful long-term planning and planting strategy for the city.

50,000 Trees explores how a ubiquitous and overlooked urban space — the freeway overpass — can become a site to strategically offset a significant part of the city’s carbon emissions at the source, with a man-made productive forest grown for carbon sequestration.

Realizing the ecosystem services benefits of tree programs depends on tree survival. Despite the focus on planting over the past few decades, overall canopy cover levels in major US cities have been declining.

The urban forest can’t pretend to be ‘natural’; it’s a construction that relies on both ecological processes as well as human ingenuity to survive. It marries the technical with the material, and expands the range of social experience and ecological resilience.

Scenario Journal

Scenario Journal is an online project focused on the next generation of urban landscapes. Scenario seeks to create a free and accessible platform for showcasing conversations across disciplines that spark collaboration, rethink urban landscape performance, and lay down a framework for design innovation.

Scenario Journal is an independant nonprofit organization, and is generously supported by PennDesign, the journal’s primary academic design affiliation.